We are living at Singamata Reef and Dive Resort off the coast of Semporna, Borneo, Malaysia. Semporna is a dirty little town with a massive fish market, loads of little shops selling mostly cellphone cards, tools, beauty and food products. Amidst are a spattering of dive shops and dive resort offices that cater and liaison for the Sipadan-Mabul area.
Singamata is exactly a 5-minute speed-boat ride from Semporna and our view is of the Semporna coastline and Bum Bum Island. Farther away and to the south, we can also see some of the smaller islands. Like so many constructions in this area, the resort is built on stilts on a sandbar. It boasts 40 rooms, a dive shop and a large dining hall area. It is a very small world – 150 steps across the farthest stretch. Most of our world is 40 steps in one direction to the dive shop and 40 steps in the other direction to the dining hall.
We have been given a small room with two twin beds that I’ve pushed together so I don’t have to get up to kiss Ryan goodnight, a small desk, a bedside table, a chair and a hanging rack with 3 hangers. It is not intended for long-term living. When Paige left Phi Phi and gave so much stuff away, Ryan had gotten from her a hanging clothes cubby from Ikea. It’s mesh with six slots and pretty much fits all my clothes. I’ve just been told that I have to share with Ryan. The bedsheets are not made of 100% cotton so they slip and slide and make me sweat.
We get free room and board and get paid a small stipend on the courses we teach. The manager realistically only needed one of us, but said she would take us both after spending some time telling us she was worried about how much money we wouldn’t make. She kept telling us that we should go to Redang or Perhentians because that’s where you make money in Malaysia. But the diving here is better and that’s what drew us here in the first place. We hemmed and hawed a long time about accepting the job, but having been turned away from all the other shops we spoke to and emailed, we were starting to feel like at the very least we would stop spending money by moving here.
The resort caters heavily to the Chinese. So the food is very biased. I'm eating a lot of rice and veg - mostly cabbage, spinach, bean sprouts and aubergine (my favorite). Sometimes there's white people noodles, but very rarely. And everyday watermelon for dessert. Not the American kind that's got no seeds. We keep snacks from the Giant supermarket in Semporna, but with no fridge, the options are limited. And the options are limited anyway. We treat ourselves to chocolate to have a little something sweet at night. And I've taken to toast with peanut butter for breakfast since I can't bring myself to eat rice and fishballs first thing in the morning.
The people are lovely – a mix of Malay and Filipino, one Spanish DM, 2 Swedish DMs and a Malay/Chinese instructor. Most of them are kids – and when I say kids, I mean as young as 16. I laugh at them so often because they are children forced into an adult world, but their reactions and attitudes are very much those of kids. There’s also a lot of singing and laughing and guitar playing which is lovely. Apparently Karaoke is a favorite pastime among the youth of Malaysia.
The Spanish DM is from Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria off the coast of Marrocco (but belongs to Spain). He is our age, well-traveled, educated, and fun to converse with. I am practicing my Spanish. Unfortunately he leaves in about a week.
Since the resort is built on a sandbar, it has a reef structure running along the side of it. This reef has a few off-shoots and extends quite far, so we can do all the diving that we want whenever we’re not working. We’ve fallen into the habit of doing one long dive per day. The reef is not in great shape, but there’s quite a bit of life to be found, especially nudibranches. I’m in macro photography heaven. Since we’ve arrived, I believe that we’ve seen 10 new species that we’d never seen before. At first we were seeing at least 2 new species every dive we did – now they’re starting to repeat themselves a bit, but still new ones crop up now and again.
The area between Borneo, Philippines and the eastern end of Indonesia (encompassing Sulawesi and Papua) is supposed to be the most biodiverse. There certainly are a lot of neat little critters around here. We’ve both enjoyed two island excursions with nice reef diving, visibility and more critters than on the house reef. And we hope to enjoy more in the coming weeks. The islands here are mostly sandbars with palm trees – a small oasis in a desert, if you will. Some of the larger ones are surrounded by resorts on stilts, thereby extending the usable real estate. A couple of the more substantial land masses are volcanic formations.
What is bit shocking is the quantity of trash in the water. Plastic bags galore, candy wrappers, chip bags, diapers (that’s just disgusting) and of course, soda cans and bottles – by no means the worse offenders. Not once have I felt indisposed while in Semporna as to where to put my trash. There are trash bins around. But it’s education – when people are done with some packaging, they drop it on the floor, or better yet, in the sea. On Phi Phi, the trash is a constant battle, but the infrastructure of PP has chosen against providing trash bins, so you can’t really blame people for leaving their trash everywhere. But in the time we’ve spent in Indo and now in Malaysia, this is simply not the case. It’s a real shame.
Our days are predictable. Reading, watching TV, various projects – Spanish for me – tech crap for Ryan, diving, eating, sleeping. Lather, rinse, repeat. And periodically we’ll get a student and teach some diving.
The million-dollar question that no one is asking (well except the manager) and neither of us has an answer to is “how long are we going to stay.” We did tend to go a bit mental after 3 straight months on PP - what will 3 straight months on stilts do to our sanity? The main appeal of Malaysia as a work destination is the ease of obtaining visas. Basically, there is no visa, we get 90 days on arrival. That means that we arrive by land, sea or air, go through customs and they get out their big rubber stamp, smack it down on a page in our passports and we can stay 90 days. No costs, no trips to immigration this and thats to extend, to check in, whatever. At the end of 90 days, we can repeat the process or go away. Our 90 days is up July 29th. I reckon we’ll have to start seriously asking the question, “should we stay or should we go?” around July 1.
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